The quintessential zombie survival mod may well have outgrown its host.

DayZ, the hugely successful open-world mod for ArmA II which has taken the survival horror genre by storm, has amassed more than 440,000 players in a mere three months since its release. Now, it could be about to find new life as a standalone game.

Dean Hall, the mod's creator and a multiplayer designer for ArmA developer Bohemia Interactive, mentioned during his developer session at Rezzed in Brighton that DayZ's success has surpassed his expectations. Originally designed as a tech demo for a hundred simultaneous players, the game started out running on just two servers. This has proven to be an immense underestimate of the mod's success, though, with what's now a user base over 400,000 members strong and as many as 22,000 concurrent players at peak times. All that traffic means that the DayZ system requires a bank of a thousand servers. It's not just survivors who have been getting picked off, either, as Hall revealed that five servers have fallen to overheating. In fact, the sheer number of connections mean that the team has trouble telling between denial of service attacks and traffic directed from YouTube videos.

Hall cites the growth of the game as one of the biggest challenges currently facing the team - the mod is available for free, so there isn't currently any profit to be made, making server upkeep a struggle. That said, since the mod was released, sales of ArmA II have skyrocketed, which Hall says "sends a really clear message, not just to Bohemia, but also the industry itself." He stated that this spike in sales is the greatest support the mod has had so far, going so far as to say that DayZ could end up outselling ArmA II if it became a standalone game. Having said this, he alluded to the transition from mod to full game, citing a possible Minecraft-style development and pricing structure for the project.

During the Q&A session in the latter half of his talk, Hall also announced the introduction of dogs to DayZ. There have apparently been teething problems with implementation as the game sits at the very limit of what the ArmA II engine can handle, but players will soon have the four-legged critters to contend with for resources on top of the other survivors and the hordes of AI-controlled zombies.

The mod, still in its alpha phase, is available over at the official DayZ site - but until it gets a standalone release, you'll still need to own ArmA II: Combined Operations to run it.

Eh. I'd be on the fence honestly. Arma 2 is probably the most poorly optimized piece of crap on the market today (of games that people actually buy). My rig can run basically anythin on maxed out settins with a full 60 fps and no framerate drops and yet I loaded up the demo and it still chugged at points when it wasn't even all that busy. I can't imagine what it'd be like with DayZ since it still uses the same code just with the number of players jacked up.

If they actually launched as a standalone game and fixed up ArmA's fucked code though? All my moneys would belong to them.

The discussion really does not come as a surprise, monetization of Day Z has been a pretty central item on the table for a hot minute. On the one hand "Great!", on the other hand... what does this mean for Day Z being ported over to the Arma III engine?

Who knows... So many of the issues with Day Z come from the fact it is riding on a game engine that really didn't have this much ambition in it's design from the get go.

Anywho, always glad to see the "old school" sensibilities come back from the past and sell some units. One small step... back into the right direction.

Win-win situation in my opinion. Many thousands more including myself would buy the game due to the fact they don't want ArmA2, and the devs get some money to upkeep servers, and for creating such a unique game.

Would Bohemia receive a cut of the sales, due to the engine or the fact it is a mod?

Tried everything to run it on my computer. Run it eventually. Played it for half an hour. Got extremely frustrated. Deleted everything.

It actually is a great, GREAT concept. A First/Third person shooter sandbox online zombie game with survival elements. Whatever more can you want? Well i want it to work without making me feel like an octopus. Arma 2 is not my kind of game. I can see people liking it, maybe. But I feel like uber polished games spoiled me for games like Arma 2. It's hard to control, it's very buggy and has a very frustrating inventory management system.

I would so play this game to death if it was little bit more polished.

shintakie10:Eh. I'd be on the fence honestly. Arma 2 is probably the most poorly optimized piece of crap on the market today (of games that people actually buy). My rig can run basically anythin on maxed out settins with a full 60 fps and no framerate drops and yet I loaded up the demo and it still chugged at points when it wasn't even all that busy. I can't imagine what it'd be like with DayZ since it still uses the same code just with the number of players jacked up.

If they actually launched as a standalone game and fixed up ArmA's fucked code though? All my moneys would belong to them.

What's your system like? I'm on a 3.3GHz i5 2500, 1GB Radeon 5770 and 4GB DDR3 and it runs fine for me on mostly high settings. I've never bothered checking the frame rate but I'd say I'm coming in over 45fps consistently.

The game's gone through some substantial optimisations since the demo, I believe, and if you were running the demo in singleplayer, multiplayer runs better anyway, since the server handles more stuff.

rapidfire21:Win-win situation in my opinion. Many thousands more including myself would buy the game due to the fact they don't want ArmA2, and the devs get some money to upkeep servers, and for creating such a unique game.

Would Bohemia receive a cut of the sales, due to the engine or the fact it is a mod?

They'd get a cut from selling it - the mod's creator works at Bohemia.

Blunderboy:Sweet, maybe now connecting to a server won't be such a hassle.

Servers have been fine for me for ages. It used to take like 20 minutes, these days I'm on in a minute or two, including time taken to boot the game.

OT: I fucking love it. I had so much adrenaline from killing someone recently (and feeling fucking awful about it) that my hands began to shake.

I recommend people play the ARMA 2 tutorials just to get used to basic stuff like movement and menu interaction, it's certainly... idiosyncratic, but it's well worth it. After a time you'll have very few issues with it.

rapidfire21:Win-win situation in my opinion. Many thousands more including myself would buy the game due to the fact they don't want ArmA2, and the devs get some money to upkeep servers, and for creating such a unique game.

Would Bohemia receive a cut of the sales, due to the engine or the fact it is a mod?

If it gets a budget then the most logical step would be to license the engine from Bohemia. Chances are they could get it reasonably cheap, as the mod already roughly doubled Arma II sales.

shintakie10:Eh. I'd be on the fence honestly. Arma 2 is probably the most poorly optimized piece of crap on the market today (of games that people actually buy). My rig can run basically anythin on maxed out settins with a full 60 fps and no framerate drops and yet I loaded up the demo and it still chugged at points when it wasn't even all that busy. I can't imagine what it'd be like with DayZ since it still uses the same code just with the number of players jacked up.

If they actually launched as a standalone game and fixed up ArmA's fucked code though? All my moneys would belong to them.

Actually it plays better because there are less complex ai operating at the same time.My computer runs arma 2 at 30 fps but it runs day z on 60.

Doclector:AHA! I've been wanting to try call of cthulhu for ages...DAMMIT! It's not compatible with windows 7!

Why didn't you get the Humble Indie Bundle when you had the chance? WHY!?!

I DIDN'T KNOW! I JUST DIDN'T KN-Wait, are you talking about the latest one? I did get that. Unfortunately, amnesia disagrees with my specific graphics chipset...

WELL DON'T JUST SIT THERE MAN! Upgrade 4 the love God! Don't you know that anyone who doesn't know how to edit Unreal Engine Ini files or has access to a top range PC powered by the ghosts of Microsoft certified system engineers HAS NO BUSINESS playing PC games?!

DVS BSTrD:Ze Day Has come!Why didn't you get the Humble Indie Bundle when you had the chance? WHY!?!

I DIDN'T KNOW! I JUST DIDN'T KN-Wait, are you talking about the latest one? I did get that. Unfortunately, amnesia disagrees with my specific graphics chipset...

WELL DON'T JUST SIT THERE MAN! Upgrade 4 the love God! Don't you know that anyone who doesn't know how to edit Unreal Engine Ini files or has access to a top range PC powered by the ghosts of Microsoft certified system engineers HAS NO BUSINESS playing PC games?!

I...i dared to overstep my place in the world...and in doing so, my foul presence has displeased the PC gods.

Doclector:I DIDN'T KNOW! I JUST DIDN'T KN-Wait, are you talking about the latest one? I did get that. Unfortunately, amnesia disagrees with my specific graphics chipset...

WELL DON'T JUST SIT THERE MAN! Upgrade 4 the love God! Don't you know that anyone who doesn't know how to edit Unreal Engine Ini files or has access to a top range PC powered by the ghosts of Microsoft certified system engineers HAS NO BUSINESS playing PC games?!

I...i dared to overstep my place in the world...and in doing so, my foul presence has displeased the PC gods.

Indeed! Who let this nouveau riche in the country club? Once the groundskeeper has dealt with that gopher I'll have him throw you out.